haunted VS lit

Web component browser APIs aren't that many, and not that hard to grasp (if you don't know about them, have a look at Google's Learn HTML section and MDN's Web Components guide); but creating a web component actually requires taking care of many small things. This is where web component libraries come in very handy, freeing us of having to think about some of those things by taking care of them for us. Most of the things I'll mention here are handled one way of another by other libraries (GitHub's Catalyst, Haunted, Hybrids, Salesforce's LWC, Slim.JS, Ionic's Stencil) but I'll focus on Google's Lit and Microsoft's FAST here as they probably are the most used web component libraries out there (ok, I lied, Lit definitely is, FAST not that much, far behind Lit and Stencil; but Lit and FAST have many things in common, starting with the fact that they are just native web components, contrary to Stencil that compiles to a web component). Both Lit and FAST leverage TypeScript decorators to simplify the code even further so I'll use that in examples, even though they can also be used in pure JS (decorators are coming to JS soon BTW). I'll also leave the most apparent yet most complex aspect for the end.

Haunted on GitHub: github.com/matthewp/haunted

Atomico and Haunted, to add the useController hook which underlies useQuery and co.

** WCs don't have to be classes. See matthewp/haunted which uses hooks like React. But that library is not a mixin or wrapper around lit-element; it would replace lit-element. It does use lit-html though.

I think the distaste many folks have for web components stems from a simple misunderstanding. The APIs collectively know as "web components" weren't intended to replace your favorite framework. As with most things that become part of the standard, these are lower level APIs that will be supported for a long, long time. They were given to us with the hope that we'd build great tools around them, which we have with Stencil, lit-element, hybrids, Haunted, and so many more.

That is the reason why I experiment with the TiniJS framework for a while. It is a collection of tools for developing web/desktop/mobile apps using the native Web Component technology, based on the Lit library. Thank you the Lit team for creating a great tool assists us working with standard Web Component easier.

https://github.com/lit/lit/tree/main/packages/labs/virtualiz...

actually, looking at it (https://lit.dev/), i do exactly that.

I also define a `render()` and extend my own parent, which does a `replaceChildren()` with the render. And, strangely, I also call the processor `html`

I'll still stick with mine however, my 'framework' is half-page of code. I dislike dependencies greatly. I'd need to be saving thousand+ lines at least.

Here, I don't want a build system to make a website; that's mad. So I don't want lit. I want the 5 lines it takes to invoke a dom parser, and the 5 lines it takes do define a webcomp parent.

I rather like https://lit.dev/ for web components so far.

For the reactivity stuff, you might want to read https://frontendmasters.com/blog/vanilla-javascript-reactivi... - it shows a bunch of no-library-required patterns that, while in a number of cases I'd much rather use a library myself, all seems at least -basically- reasonable to me and will probably be far more comprehensible to you than whatever I'd reach for, and frameworks are always much more pleasant to approach after you've already done a bunch of stuff by banging rocks together first.

I work on Lit, which I would hesitate to call a framework, but gives a framework-like DX for building web components, while trying to keep opinions to a minimum and lock-in as low as possible.

It's got reactivity, declarative templates, great performance, SSR, TypeScript support, native CSS encapsulation, context, tasks, and more.

It's used to build Material Design, settings and devtools UIs for Chrome, some UI for Firefox, Reddit, Photoshop Web...

https://lit.dev if you're interested.

I am more a fan of the augmented style because it doesn't entrap you in dev lock-in to platforms.

The problem with frameworks, especially web frameworks, is they reimplement many items that are standard now (shadowdom, components, storage, templating, base libraries, class/async, network/realtime etc).

If you like the component style of other frameworks but want to use Web Components, Google Lit is quite nice.

Google Lit is like a combination of HTML Web Components and React/Vue style components. The great part is it is build on Web Components underneath.

[1] https://lit.dev/

From the comments I see here, it seems like people expect the Webcomponents API to be a complete replacement for a JS framework. The thing is, our frameworks should start making use of modern web APIs, so the frameworks will have to do less themselves, so can be smaller. Lit [0] for example is doing this. Using Lit is very similar to using React. Some things work different, and you have to get used to some web component specific things, but once you get it, I think it's way more pleasant to work with than React. It feels more natural, native, less framework-specific.

For state management, I created LitState [1], a tiny library (really only 258 lines), which integrates nicely with Lit, and which makes state management between multiple components very easy. It's much easier than the Redux/flux workflows found in React.

So my experience with this is that it's much nicer to work with, and that the libraries are way smaller.

[0] https://lit.dev/